The BBC has indicated that third party content owners are seeking to ensure that reception equipment will implement ... copy protection. Because [these] requirements are not mandatory, representatives of content owners have asked the BBC to take steps to ensure that reception equipment will implement the specified content management arrangements.

This is part 1 of a three-part series on user tracking on the web today. You can read Part 2 here.

Cookies are still a privacy problem for web users, many years after privacy advocates first raised concerns about their use to track web browsing. Today, cookies are one of the main mechanisms that advertising companies like Google use to track and profile users across sites and over time -- often building up a single gigantic profile for years and years. Many EFF members respond to this threat by using their browsers' cookie management features to limit which cookies they'll accept or how long they'll be retained.

Monday, September 21st will be the second Geek Reading event to benefit EFF, at 111 Minna in downtown San Francisco. This time, the author in question is Randall Munroe, otherwise known as the writer and cartoonist behind the brilliant webcomic xkcd.

For those not yet part of the xkcd cult, the cartoon with the strange name consistently brings some of the sharpest satire to the world of the Internet and digital culture. Randall describes the strip as "a webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math, and language," and the New York Times calls it "wildly popular among techies the world over for its witty use of programming code in its gags." It is currently translated into three languages and receives between 60 and 70 million page views per month.

How should city transit authorities treat independent software developers who make use of public schedule data? What approach results in the best experience for their passengers and customers?

Two models appear to be emerging to answer this question. One, typified by New York City's MTA and Washington, DC's WMATA, sees schedule and related data as valuable intellectual property, to be zealously protected, licensed and monetized. So far, the results of this approach appear to have been bad press, irate passengers, wasted money and stymied innovation.

In the past couple weeks, two major online service providers, Blogger and Flickr, announced improvements to their DMCA takedown policies. EFF had a hand in both: Blogger contacted us to discuss their improvements, and we contacted Flickr to raise some concerns we had. We're glad to see these improvements, which make the process more transparent for users and minimize the collateral damage to free speech that can sometimes be the result when a copyright owner sends a takedown notice.

The UK government still seems unsure as to whether it's a good idea to punish those accused of illegal downloading by cutting off Internet access for entire households, saying it wants to "support" the music industry. But now it seems a coalition of the actual British musicians, songwriters and producers behind the music don't want "support" of this kind, and view this sort of draconian policy as "extraordinarily negative."

Thankfully, there are some people in the UK who think this sort of draconian policy is a terrible idea, and are taking a stand against it — namely, the British music community.